


Heartless

by sibley (ferns)



Category: Doom Patrol (TV)
Genre: Emotional Manipulation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Gen, Hopeful Ending, What-If, plus some cameos by everyone's favorite animals (and animal-based dieties)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-22
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:06:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23122213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: The year is 1950, and Eric Morden realizes that if hetrulywants to destroy Niles Caulder, he has to start by cutting his heart right out of his chest.The year is 1950, and Dorothy Spinner is approached by a man who calls her special and says that if she comes with him, she'll never,everhave to be alone again.The year is 1950, and suddenly Niles' motivation for his greatest experiment changes from merely protecting his daughter to retrieving her from the most formidable enemy he's ever encountered.
Relationships: Dorothy Spinner & Eric Morden, Dorothy Spinner & Niles Caulder
Comments: 8
Kudos: 23





	1. lzjhwl fvby ylhspaf

**Author's Note:**

> Before we begin, some timeline notes—I've hammered out a rough timeline for this that involves Dorothy being conceived in late 1916, immediately before Niles was found in the Yukon, and born in 1917. Assuming what he showed us wasn't a lie, which it very well could have been, Mr. Nobody was kicked out of the Brotherhood of Evil in 1946, and I decided to use February 14th as the exact date, then got his powers in 1948, and I went with the 14th again because it fits in the October-April bracket that is Paraguay's rainiest season and... well. I am nothing if not a sucker for the heart imagery that he's sorely lacking on the show.
> 
> Additionally, unrelated to the timeline, she's not mentioned very often by name, but I'm going to be calling Dorothy's mother Oweyah. I know a crew member named her Slava, but that... is _not_ something I want to call her. Oh, and on a lighter note, this was originally titled "How to Train Your Supervillain," and unrelated to _all_ of that, while Crowdark is not technically a character, she is present from the start in her... shall we say... observation of Dorothy.
> 
> Titles for the chapters are run through a Caesar Cipher. They're not really necessary to decode, don't worry.
> 
> [ **CW:** this chapter contains violent possessiveness from a parent, general unintentional creepiness toward children, some descriptions (of Mr. Nobody specifically) that could be taken as body horror, brief mentions of menstruation, and mentions of past ableism and ableist abuse toward Dorothy as someone with a craniofacial disorder by her adopted mother.
> 
> This is for chapter one only. All four chapters will have content warnings in the opening notes of each of them.]

Dorothy knows the rules, of course. She knows she’s not supposed to talk to strangers. When she’s allowed to leave the house, she’s not supposed to go any farther than the cornfield unless she’s being sent on an errand. She’s not supposed to act like her imaginary friends are real people. It’s not right or proper or good. She scares people already, she shouldn’t try to be any weirder than she already is. She shouldn’t be a bad little girl.

But this stranger is weird, too. He’s all flattened, and there are pieces missing from him. The parts of his body she can see are odd in a way that gives her a headache. She can only  _ really  _ see him clearly out of the corner of her eye. When she tries to look at him straight on he shimmers like a heat mirage and the bits of him that are missing start to bleed over into the rest of his body.

“Stop that,” she says. He does, the parts that she can see going rigid in their visibility, and the one of his eyes that’s actually visible blinks at her. Dorothy’s no good at reading faces even when she can see them in their entirety, so she’s got no idea of how surprised he is. “Are you one of my imaginary friends?”

She  _ knows  _ she didn’t make him up. She would  _ know  _ if she’d made him up like she’d made up Darling-Come-Home and Damn All, or even if he was something like the cold wax one that crept around at the edges of her head and pulled at the blood in her veins, or at least she thinks she would. But if she didn’t make him up, then where could he have come from? The only people she sees since her only friend moved away and since she had to get rid of Darling-Come-Home and her family are the kids from town who come up the road to pick on her and sometimes her mother, when she can be bothered to let her out of or into the house.

Well, that’s not quite true. She sees the crows a whole lot. Sometimes they act so silly, they almost count as people. There’s one big one in particular that Dorothy likes to think of as her friend. But that’s  _ different,  _ because only freaks and naughty girls pretend crows listen to them. 

“No,” he says, and his  _ voice  _ is twisted strangely too, just like his body is. He reminds her of her Inky Boys. Maybe she made him by accident, and neither of them know it. He takes a step toward her, and it’s like all the parts of him move independently of his whole. “I’m not one of your friends, Dorothy.” He holds out his hand, the pieces of it shifting around to form something solid. “But I could be.”

“If you’re not one of my friends, then you’re a stranger.” She backs up a little bit. There’s nowhere to press against to protect her back, just the whispering of the corn stalks nearby, but she’s good at running and hiding through the furrows and leaves. Dorothy’s done it lots of times to get away from bullies. He’ll never find her in there if she runs. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”

“Really, how old  _ are  _ you?” He lets his hand drop down to his side and rolls the eye that Dorothy can see. Somehow, the rest of his body rolls with it. Not talking to strangers is a rule for  _ children.  _ She’s many things, but she’s  _ certainly  _ no child.

“Eleven,” Dorothy says easily.

He waves his hand. “And how long have you been eleven?”

Dorothy opens her mouth to answer and suddenly realizes that she doesn’t know. She’s only been eleven for a  _ year,  _ it could only have been a year, that’s how birthdays work, but it still tastes weird in her mouth to say that. Her last birthday party was  _ ages  _ ago, back when she still had Darling-Come-Home to teach her how to read and write and count. She must have had one since then, right? 

But she hadn’t been growing, or anything, and even before she’d had her made up family her mother would tell her when her birthday was because it meant she was one year closer to Dorothy being old enough to be kicked out on her own. That’s why she’d been so excited the first time Dorothy bled. She’d said it meant Dorothy was close to being a woman. Then she’d made her scrub her underwear until there wasn’t a hint of dry brown anywhere.

Finally, she settles on saying “I’ve been eleven since I turned eleven” and hoping that that’s the right answer. Or at least the one that he was looking for, since sometimes those aren’t actually the same thing.

The man smiles. “See, Dorothy, I know you don’t belong down here with these corn-shucking asshats. You’re  _ special.  _ That’s why people are shit to you. Because you’re like me. I can help you get away from all this bullshit. I can take you somewhere you’ll really belong, where you wouldn’t have to feel lonely anymore. You’d just have to do one little thing with me in the future. We’ll work that out when we get to it.”

Dorothy does not say that her mother says that the reason why people pick on her is because she’s an ugly freak. She does not say that she’s definitely  _ not  _ special, even though she made up a family to be hers before she learned how wrong it all was. She doesn’t say that it makes her chest hurt to think about leaving the only place she can remember, even if she knows it’s not where she was born. It would be true to say those things, or at least they would be things  _ she  _ thought were true, but she doesn’t. She doesn’t even ask how he knew her name—he knew it even before he said she was special. 

Instead, what she says is, “Can I get some stuff from home before I go?”

What no one has ever understood about her is that she wants nothing more than to leave and find out who she is. Her mother says that if she leaves she’ll poison more people the way she poisoned her father, but how can she poison someone who says that he’s already just like her? Someone who says that she’s  _ special? _

He grins. It makes another piece of him crack off. “Of course.”

Resolve hardening in her stomach, Dorothy turns around to go back into her house. She doesn’t own much, and she knows that the only things that actually belong to her and not to her mother are small enough to bring with her. Before she can actually leave, she turns around to look over her shoulder. He looks like he did when he first showed up next to the cornfield. All _wrong._ It’s especially jarring because of the achingly normal crow perched next to him. “I’m Dorothy.” Of course, he already knew her name, but it’s _polite_ to introduce yourself. “What’s your name?”

He’s suddenly right next to her again. She wishes he wouldn’t do that. It’s kinda scary.

“You can call me Eric,” he says, patting her head, and for the first time in recent memory, Dorothy smiles.

* * *

Everything Dorothy owns fits inside the bundle she makes out of her  _ favorite  _ blue and white dress.

A thin pink hair ribbon that she doubts her mother remembers buying her. A watch that her mother said belonged to her father, her  _ real  _ father and not her mother’s dead husband, that she’d once thrown at Dorothy and said that she could have it since it was broken and didn’t tell time, so it was useless just like Dorothy was. A piece of clay moulded into the shape of a cat that her only  _ real  _ friend had given her before he’d left. A little shard of mirror from the one that she’d once broken by accident when she’d carelessly left it leaning against the wall over the sink, with the chunk the only part that survived. All that’s left is a pair of stockings, the worn pair of shoes she’d had as long as she could remember, a singular nightgown, a drab grey dress, and three pairs of underwear. 

She ties it all together with some cord in a haphazard knot that threatens to come undone at any second and creeps past where her mother is sleeping despite the fact that the cold February sun is still high in the sky. She doesn’t want to say goodbye. She knows her mother wouldn’t say goodbye to  _ her  _ if it was the other way around. Still, she considers doing it anyway. But she’d probably be more angry that Dorothy woke her up from her nap than she would be sad about her leaving. Even if she  _ was  _ leaving with a stranger. (Were they really a stranger once you knew their name?)

Eric’s standing outside waiting for her. Still all cut to pieces. She hopes he’s not like that  _ all  _ the time. It’s hard to look at him. Maybe he doesn’t want to be looked at the way she doesn’t like to be looked at—or at least  _ stared  _ at—but he could at least make it a little easier. The odd glowing that he has in some of his parts mixed with the  _ nothingness  _ of most of the rest of him makes it even harder.

“Ready to go?” He says, that eerily huge smile on what’s left of his face making something inside of her squirm. “All you have to do is take my hand and you can kiss these numbskulls the fuck goodbye.”

He keeps  _ doing that.  _ Like he’s only pretending to talk in a high, kind of sing-songy voice, and every now and then something a bit deeper and angrier breaks through. He needs to learn to be a better actor. Maybe he should listen to the radio more often. There are some nice ladies on there who will give people tips on that kind of thing if they find the right channel, like Dorothy’s done on more than one occasion.

She doesn’t  _ trust  _ him. Not really. But she’ll do anything to get away from these people. Anywhere is better than here. Like what the Dorothy in the movie says. There’s no place like home, and this isn’t home. Home probably isn’t with a guy who’s all in pieces and keeps saying words that would get Dorothy’s mouth washed out with soap, but… he said she was special. And people like them are supposed to stick together, aren’t they? And if something bad  _ does  _ happen, her imaginary friends can protect her. Even from people like him.

Dorothy takes his hand and the world goes white, and the last thing she sees is a crow on a fencepost.

It feels strange, like her heart is getting pulled out through her throat. She stumbles forward, letting go of Eric’s hand and clutching tightly at her little bundle. Everything was bright white around her, like when she went outside in the middle of the winter and everything was so quiet and still that it felt like she was a ghost. Except it wasn’t cold like it was when it snowed.

“Ta-da,” Eric says cheerfully, and it doesn’t echo the way it did when they were at her house. She turns to look at him, and oh! He’s  _ so  _ much easier to look at here! There’s still something  _ off  _ about him, though she can’t really tell if it’s because there’s a very tangible  _ nothing  _ where his eyes should be or because when he moves his body changes and she can see the parts that are detached, but it’s better than how it was before, so she smiles again. “We’ll have to get you set up with somewhere to sleep if you still need to sleep, but this should be fine for now. It’s fine for  _ me  _ so it’s fine for you.”

“There’s nothing here,” Dorothy says, confused. She spins in a little circle, holding onto her things so tightly her knuckles hurt. “I can’t live here. There’s just… nothing. Nobody could live here.”

“Well, if you want something to be there,  _ make  _ something to be there.” Dorothy doesn’t see Eric’s eyes narrow, or recognize the sudden calculation in his voice for what it is. She doesn’t register his wondering if she will be able to intuitively bend the space around her, or if the control she has only extends to the “real world.” 

What she does pick up on, however, is that this is a test. Like when the doctors played sounds and asked if she could hear them. Eric wants to see if she knows what to do. And even though she isn’t sure exactly what it is or where it’s coming from, something inside of Dorothy tells her that she  _ can  _ do this. 

She taps her heels together and imagines she’s Dorothy Gale coming home from Oz, and the white nothing arounds her crumples in on itself before straightening out again, a copy of her mother’s farmhouse spreading out around her like a tea stain on a napkin. She looks over her shoulder at Eric. “Like that?”

His smile is too wide. Dorothy ignores it. Her smile looks different too. It’s because they’re both special. That’s what he said. “Just like that. Although…” He flicks his hands out and suddenly they’re standing in the middle of a dense rainforest, the sound of frogs and birds all around them. “You’ve been living in the fuckoff nowhere South your whole life. Why not try making something  _ new?” _

Dorothy clicks her heels again, just because it seems right, and the rainforest is wiped away by a sprawling city. It’s completely deserted except for the two of them, and trees twist up the sides of all the buildings, which are too tall for their tops to be seen—instead they just cut off in jagged stripes. They’re made of green and blue glass instead of metal and concrete, blinking white lights flickering in the leaves like candlelight through a window.

(Dorothy’s never been to a city. She barely even goes into town anymore, and it’s only a few blocks wide with a small handful of buildings. But this is what she imagines one to be. As empty as her tiny town, just multiplied by a thousand times in size, shooting endlessly in every direction.)

“Nice.” Eric’s smile grows even wider, and Dorothy can’t help but smile back. “You’re a fucking natural, you know that?”

“You shouldn’t say those words,” Dorothy says. She’s been meaning to tell him that. “My mother would wash your mouth out with soap. Both of them. And Damn All, too.”

Eric throws his head back and laughs like a rooster. It makes the parts of him drift away even more. Dorothy giggles. “Well, your mother’s not here right now, is she? And I don’t see any imaginary friends.” She doesn’t wonder how he knew about that. It seems like he knows  _ everything. _ “We can say whatever the hell we want to whoever the fuck we want!” He pats her head. “Go on. Give it a try.”

“...Fuck,” Dorothy whispers. Eric claps, and she smiles so wide it makes her mouth hurt. It feels nice to be able to smile without getting laughed at. She does a little twirl, still holding tight to her bundle of things. “Fuck!”

The sound of her laughter echoes through the White Space, loud and clear and bright, and Eric laughs with her. God, this is going to be so much  _ fun. _

* * *

When Niles makes his bimonthly visit to the house of the woman he assigned to be Dorothy’s stepmother, the inside is empty and the windows are dark. Everything is scrubbed bare, but there are scuff marks on the floor like the occupants left in a hurry. There’s a note stuck to the cabinet saying that the woman he hired is leaving and she refuses to come back, but more importantly than that, there’s a message carved on the wall of Dorothy’s room. He barely manages to get through the first reading of it without seeing red.

How that man found his daughter he has no idea, and to be honest he doesn’t particularly care. The how and the why of it don’t matter in the long run. What _does_ matter is that he has her, and Niles is going to do anything and everything he possibly can to get her back. And if he’s harmed so much as a hair on her head—and even if he hasn’t—he’s going to tear him limb from limb.

He’s getting farther than he thought possible in his trials with the Bureau of Normalcy, and while his animal experiments and tests done on himself are working out nicely, every day Niles is getting closer to trying his greatest achievement out on other people in a more natural setting than the sterility of his lab. Niles knows he’s going to try to push three times as hard now, because he  _ has  _ to get Dorothy back, not that the Bureau will care about that.

He’d originally started this to  _ protect  _ Dorothy. And that hasn’t changed when he considers the long term. There’s just the small matter to be dealt with of getting her back first. Perhaps he needs to alter some of his planned experimentation. He’ll need to be careful. That man’s a fool but he’s not an idiot. If he knows Niles is coming for him he’ll kill Dorothy, he’s sure of it. Which would just ruin  _ everything. _

So yes. He has to get her back first. If anything, this only proves the necessity of some of his experimentation. Already, someone has taken her from her home in order to hurt her, or hurt him through her if the message left behind is to be believed  _ (believed,  _ not  _ trusted.  _ You simply can’t trust a man like that). Drastic actions like that require drastic countermeasures.

How fortunate that he’d been working on those countermeasures long before those actions were taken.


	2. 2: aptl huk aptl hnhpu

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [ **CW:** this chapter contains manipulation (from Niles) and psychological abuse, internalized ableism, internalized homophobia, mislabeling of DID as MPD, the name Kay Challis being used for Jane and the Underground (one time only), animal distress, dehumanization of Oweyah by Niles, mentioned forced separation of Oweyah and Dorothy in the past, brief mention of gore/body horror/child death, and mentions of past abuse by Dorothy's adopted mother.]

_1956_

“You don’t know how grateful I am that you’re helping me, Dr. Caulder—oh, alright, _fine._ You don’t know how grateful I am that you’re helping me, _Niles.”_ Rita laughs a little and arranges the blanket covering her lower body to look a little nicer, fidgeting a little with her hands. “And I know you say that you don’t want any money, but…”

“Trust me, Ms. Farr.” Niles reaches over from next to her where he’s writing a letter to a friend of his to ask for help in examining her condition to squeeze her hand. “Helping you and people liking you is enough of a reward. I get enough funding from private backers as long as I give them a portion of the research I conduct on my animal subjects.”

“Still, surely there’s _something_ I can do to repay you,” Rita says. “You’ve done so much for me already, even if we haven’t figured out a cure yet. I owe you everything. And you know that if _I’m_ going to call you _Niles,_ then you should call _me_ Rita.”

“Nonsense.” Niles smiles indulgently at her and starts sealing the envelope. “You’re the one doing all the real work, _Rita.”_ Playing to her ego and convincing her that she’s exactly as special as she thinks he is, and that he’s the only one who recognizes it now, has worked wonders in the past, and it’s clearly working now, since she preens a little under his praise before continuing.

“I’m not a doctor working tirelessly to help a stranger. Not that we’re strangers anymore. You know I want to pay you back for how you’ve helped me,” she persists. “There must be something. Even if it isn’t money. An opportunity to meet one of my old colleagues, perhaps? Or something else?”

“...Well,” Niles sighs after a long moment of silence, because this is the opportunity he’s been waiting for after providing her with _just_ the right amount of resistance, “I suppose it is about time I told you something about my history.” He sets down the envelope on his desk and turns to her. “But I would appreciate a level of… discretion.”

Rita sits up a little straighter and lifts her chin. Proud to be considered a trustworthy confidante of someone so important to her. “Of course, Niles.”

“Many years ago, I had a daughter.” Niles closes his eyes at Rita’s little gasp. “She was… special. Like you. And someone came and stole her from me.” His fist clenches. “I know she’s still alive out there. Somewhere. I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to find her. So I can rescue her and protect her as long as she lives.” He looks at Rita and chooses his next words carefully. “I know you were never a mother yourself. But I’m sure you can imagine the pain I must feel. The only thing you could ever do for me is… help me look for her.”

“Of—of course, Niles.” Rita clasps her hands over her heart. She feels warm. To be trusted with something like this is… it’s an honor, not that she’ll say that to Niles and risk embarrassing herself. Hopefully he recognizes how much it means to her that he would trust her with something so sensitive and important. “I would be happy to help you. I told you, I owe you everything.”

* * *

“Are you sure about this, Mr. Eric?” Dorothy rubs the hem of her dress between her fingers. “I’ve never tried to summon so many before…”

“Of course I’m sure,” Eric scoffs, lazily reshaping the space around him so that it marbles in on itself like dipping a watercolor brush into paint. “You can do anything you put your mind to, or some other shit that sounds like it belongs on an inspirational poster. You can do this.”

“...Okay.” Dorothy draws in on herself a little bit. “If you really think I can…”

She takes a deep breath and hops forward before flicking her hands like Eric does when he wants to make the White Space follow his will. He’s said it doesn’t actually help with anything, and maybe that’s true, but it feels nice when she does it.

Pretty Miss Dot is first, because she’s easy. Then Paddle the Sky, because Paddle is easy too. Then Heart of Ice. Then the Vegans. Then Dark as the Morning. Then Dorothy’s legs start to shake. Her skin feels too tight and breathing _hurts,_ dizziness twisting in her guts. 

Dot disappears, then Paddle, then the Vegans, then Heart of Ice, then Dark, and Dorothy’s legs go out from under her, the White Space as soft as a cushion when her knees crash into it.

Her throat feels tight and her eyes burn with tears even if she can’t exactly tell why she’s crying. Most of it is just from sheer exertion, but there’s a part of her that burns with shame. They’ve been building up to this. Seeing if she can summon all of her friends at once. But she just… can’t. She can’t. And she knows Eric _really_ believed in her. He really thought she could do it. And she let him down.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I really tried… I really tried to be good enough. I’m sorry, Mr. Eric.”

Dorothy closes her eyes. She can’t look up at him and see his disappointment, the same expression she saw on her mother’s face every time she so much as looked in Dorothy’s direction. She just can’t. Even _here,_ where she’s supposed to be able to control everything around her because she’s special just like he is, she can’t do anything right.

“Ah, well,” Eric says finally, “there’s always tomorrow. I’m not mad. I probably couldn’t have done that, you know.”

Dorothy peeks up at him. “Really?”

“Of course.” He smiles down at her without teeth. “We can find some other shit to do until you feel better and are ready to try again.”

“...Oh. Okay.” Dorothy stands up and the white blankness turns back into her city. It’s not tiring at all to do that now. She only really has to _think_ and then it will _become._ Like making her friends, only easier. “Can we go back to the beach?”

Her city is replaced by rolling dunes of sand and the crashing of the waves fills her ears. It even smells like salt. Just like a real ocean, Eric says. Dorothy wouldn’t know. She hadn’t even thought oceans were a real thing until he’d shown her. She closes her eyes again and tilts her chin up, breathing in deep.

“Thank you for not being mad at me,” she says quietly a few minutes later. “I really did try _really_ hard.”

“...You’re welcome, Dorothy. I know you did.”

* * *

_1968_

“I trust you found the greenhouse to your liking?” Niles asks. “I hope it wasn’t in too poor of a condition when you went inside… I haven’t been in there in quite some time, even to tidy up. I barely even go to that part of the property anymore, so I assume my wild roses were in terrible condition.”

“They were a bit of a mess,” Larry admits, taking a seat at the table with his smoothie. Rita already told him she wasn’t going to be coming down for dinner, so it was just him and Niles for the night. “But thank you. It’s been a long time since I did anything that made me feel… normal.”

“It was my pleasure,” Niles says with a gentle smile. He takes a bite of his chicken. “Like I said, I haven’t gotten around to taking care of everything in awhile, so they were in need of some care and attention. I’m sure you’ll be a wonderful custodian of that old place.”

Larry nods, slowly, and stirs his straw around in his smoothie. “Dr. Caulder?”

Niles waves his hand and gathers some more chicken and rice on his fork. “Oh, please, Captain Trainor. We’ve gotten to know each other quite well. If I call you Larry, will you call me Niles?”

Larry makes a sound somewhat like laughter behind the bandages. But it could just be some smoothie going down the wrong pipe. “Alright, then. Niles, what made you decide to do all of this for us? Most people wouldn’t even think of helping Rita and I with our… you know… our issues.”

Niles looks down at his dinner and contemplates his answer for some time before responding. In reality, he has almost every bit of this rehearsed. Almost every single thing that could possibly have led to the way that he would integrate this concept into the lives of his subjects was something he had extensively planned for. That was only right, of course. He _had_ to have everything lined up just right.

“Some time ago, I fell in love.” A lie, but Larry doesn’t have to know that. He never loved Oweyah. He was fascinated by her in every respect, but fascination was not the same thing as _love._ “We had a daughter together. But she was… different. Like you and Rita are different.”

“Did she die?” Larry’s question was so quiet Niles almost couldn’t hear it.

“No, but sometimes I—well, I almost wish she had. I know that’s terrible of me. But she was taken by an old enemy of mine. God only knows what he’s done to her. I’ve worked hard to try to get her back, but… I haven’t been able to. I know she’s alive, but I haven’t been able to reach her. So I decided to devote as much of my time as I could to helping the people who I believe to be like her. People like yourself and Rita.” Niles shakes his head. “You were—or are—a father yourself, correct? Surely you can imagine the pain this loss has caused me through the years.”

Larry bows his head. He knows he was a terrible father to his boys. They had been deserving of someone much better than him. They would have flourished under someone like Niles, he’s sure of it. Someone caring. Who apologized for his mistakes. Who didn’t have the—the _desires_ that Larry did. “I’m so sorry.”

Knowing Larry can’t see him, Niles smiles.

* * *

The corn rustles in the breeze as Dorothy stands up on her toes, trying to peer over the waving stalks.

This is her first time being back in the real world since Eric took her to the White Space for the first time. She’s supposed to be here to see if she can still call at least one of her imaginary friends back to her. Eric said he didn’t want her to get too used to the ease with which she could manipulate the White Space. Dorothy supposes that makes a kind of sense, but that doesn’t make it any less frightening to be alone in the corn. 

Corn isn’t scary, but corn can hide things. Things like scarecrows and people with hands made of dripping wax and boys with twisted limbs and empty eyes and gaping holes where their stomachs should have been and little girls running from their bullies. Dorothy knows all of that because she grew up with corn. It hides _everything._ Good or bad.

She plans to call up Heart of Ice. She could cut through all of that endless corn in seconds. Even if that might be wrong, because she’s never seen this farm before, and the people inside might be nice, even if they’re probably _not_ just like everyone else she’s ever met except her only friends in the entire world—

Dorothy’s thoughts are cut off by the rasping cry of a frightened crow from somewhere within the corn.

She holds her breath and strains her ears to hear it again. It’s hard for her to hear things. Her mother used to say that the only reason she wasn’t deaf was because her own father had to put her under the knife to fix her ears so she could hear things like everyone else (Dorothy is pretty sure it _isn’t_ actually like everyone else, but once when she tried to bring that up she got smacked) and that it was all his fault he hadn’t fixed how they _looked,_ too.

The crow call is louder this time and somehow more frantic, even if it isn’t any closer.

Dorothy takes a deep breath and looks up at the scorching hot sun above her before setting her jaw and marching into the corn. If she can’t find her way out, she can always go back to the White Space. Eric made sure she knew how to do that backwards and forwards and with her eyes closed—not that it mattered, since the concepts of forward and backward didn’t even seem to _exist_ within the White Space—before sending her off to practice outside.

She slips through the corn after the distant crying of the bird, stopping whenever she feels lost and waiting for it to sound again.

When she finds the source, it’s a _huge_ crow not _quite_ big enough to be a raven (but it’s close) entangled in green netting and clearly very unhappy about it. It caws when it sees her, flopping around in all directions, and she can’t tell if it’s trying to get away from her as a perceived predator or trying to come closer.

Then she sees the fox, stalking toward it from the other side of the furrow, and she springs forward, waving her arms to make herself seem bigger than she actually is. The fox startles and runs, crashing through the corn at a breakneck pace to get away from her. Dorothy smiles before turning her attention back to the trapped bird.

“Hi,” she says quietly, crouching down in the tilled dirt. “I’m Dorothy.” It’s only polite to introduce yourself to someone you’re trying to help, even if they’re just a bird. “Is it okay if I get the net off of you?”

Miraculously, the crow calms, beak parted slightly as it pants but makes no further moves to escape. Dorothy creeps closer and starts to pull at the netting, apologizing every time it catches. The bird squawks a little every time it does. Dorothy considers calling Heart of Ice to cut through the rough plastic strands, but her blades are so big she’d probably just hurt the poor thing by accident.

“It’s okay,” Dorothy says, still trying to be as gentle and quiet as she can. “I’m just helping. I only have to get a little more off you…”

When she gets the last of it off, the crow jumps up in a flurry of feathers, cawing loudly with triumph. Dorothy laughs, covering her mouth with one hand. She’s glad it’s okay. Especially since it’s the first _real_ animal she’s seen since… since… well, since she doesn’t know how long. Since she went to the White Space for the first time.

“I have to go home now,” she says. “But maybe I’ll see you again sometime?”

The crow caws again, hopping forward before spreading its wings so it can take off. It circles above Dorothy’s head a few times before shooting upward and disappearing as it blots out the sun. A single feather drifts down in the cold darkness that had most certainly _not_ been there before and lands in front of Dorothy on the ground.

She stares at it for a second before looking up at the silver dollar moon hanging low in the sky.

She doesn’t take the feather, and the feeling of eyes watching her from the stars only stops when she gets back to the White Space.

If he was watching when it happened, Eric doesn’t bring it up, and Dorothy doesn’t say anything about it other than that her little field trip to the outside world—or the _inside_ world, as Eric puts it—went well.

Whatever it was she saved, Dorothy is pretty sure it wasn’t a crow.

While she doesn’t mean for it to be that way, that’s the last time she considers calling up one of her imaginary friends for help or guidance or companionship for a long, long time.

* * *

_1980_

“How are you feeling today, Jane?”

Jane smiles tightly and hugs her knees closer to her chest. She’s sitting on her bed, clothes and fingers stained with paint from The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. A few of her fingers are wrapped in bandages from where Hammerhead had accidentally pricked them sewing patches onto her favorite jacket yesterday. “Fine. Why does it matter?”

“It matters because I care about you,” Niles reminds her gently. “How are you _really_ feeling?”

“Trapped,” she mumbles. “I’ve been here with Flit all morning since we stopped painting. She just—she wants to _move._ And I can’t. I just need to sit here. And I don’t want to go back inside to the stations.”

Niles smiles, as fatherly as he can. “Thank you, Jane. I’m very proud of you for telling me the truth. Would you like me to bring you some breakfast? Larry made pancakes for Rita, and despite her appetite I’m sure there are still some left.”

Jane shakes her head. “No, I don’t—we don’t…” She shakes it again, this time biting at her lower lip. “Can you just stay up here? With me? Please?”

It’s only been two years since she first came to the manor. Two years since she crashed into Larry and Rita’s lives. And only a little longer than that since she crashed into Niles’, since Forsythe brought him the paperwork about Kay Challis, afflicted with Multiple Personality Disorder (though Niles thought that name was ridiculous—Jane didn’t have multiple personalities, she simply had multiple people living alongside her). 

And yet moments like this, where she outright _asked_ for _him,_ a man she had only known a short time and had been clearly reluctant to trust from the very start, proved that she had been working on her internal relationship toward him. Of course, the ones like Hammerhead probably still hate him, but that’s only understandable. That’s the job of someone who protects someone else, after all.

“Of course I can.” He appraises her. He’s fairly sure she trusts him enough to listen to him if he tells her about Dorothy. His wonderful, perfect Dorothy. He waited only a bit longer than this to tell the other two. “Would it be alright if I told you a story?”

Jane snorts. “I’m not a _kid._ I don’t need a bedtime story at 9 AM on a Wednesday.”

“I know, I know. You’re a grown woman. But it’s something I’ve already told Larry and Rita, and I think it would be good for you to hear it.” There. Mentioning that it was something Larry and Rita knew that she didn’t would almost certainly get her on board with listening to him.

Sure enough, Jane perks up a little, clearly trying not to seem like she’s as interested as she obviously is. “...Alright. Tell us.”

“I keep it a closely-guarded secret, but… I have a daughter.” Niles looks away from her. “She’s special. Like how Rita and Larry are special—but I believe, most importantly, like how _you_ and your other persons are special. And some time ago she was taken from me by a man who thought I had wronged him. I know she’s alive somewhere, but I can’t find her.”

“That’s why you help people like us,” Jane says. Discerning. She’s far more clever than people give her credit for. They all are. “Because you can’t help your daughter.”

“That’s right.” Niles closes his eyes. “You remind me very much of the person she could have turned out to be if she hadn’t been taken.”

Jane doesn’t say that that’s not a compliment to his daughter. She just feels a sudden surge of guilt for no reason, and the desire to help Niles so she can gain even more of his approval wells up even more in her chest.

* * *

The fragment of mirror that Dorothy took from home with her hangs against the open air of the White Space. She only has to take a few deep breaths before it expands outward in fractals that slither close enough that they may as well be a solid mass. Showing her what her own face looks like for the first time in years.

She looks different than how she remembers herself, but she can’t tell why.

Her ears look the same. Twists of flesh that her father had to fix. Her lower jaw is sunk back and she has really no lower lip, which makes her teeth stick out from her upper jaw. Her nose is flat and pushed slightly up—it’s hard to breathe through it. Her skin is brown, darker than her mother’s and darker than Eric’s (at least the parts of him that have skin), but lighter than her old friend’s. Her hair is thick and dark and falls to just above the bottom of her shoulder blades and it’s wavy in places. Her eyes are dark and they seem too big for her face, sunken and bulging at the same time. That’s all the same, too. Maybe it’s because she’s gotten older. 

Dorothy doesn’t look like any woman she’s ever seen. 

She knows she could change how she looks. She’s changed other parts of herself. She changed her insides so they wouldn’t bleed anymore. It hadn’t even been very hard. No surgical precision required, just enough passion to pull it off. 

So she could change it. She knows she could. Eric changes how he looks all the time. He says that since time goes so slowly for them, they have all the time in the world to learn how to do everything the White Space allows them to do. But he always looks the same when he changes, even when he looks different. (Which doesn’t make any sense. But it’s true.)

However… changing herself on the outside would be different than changing her insides. Changing her insides made her who she wanted to be. Changing her outside would be different. It’d be like changing who she is. Even though that’s the opposite of how it’s supposed to be. Inside-out just like the real world and the White Space. Besides, there’s already something different, isn’t there? Isn’t there?

Dorothy tilts her head back and forth and looks at herself thoughtfully again, trying to figure out what exactly _is_ different. It must be something. It can’t even be that she’s older, because she doesn’t _look_ older, even if she’s sure it’s been at least a year so she must be at least twelve now… There’s something. She’s sure of it.

Then she smiles, a little, at the way her heavy eyebrows knit together, and realizes _that’s_ it. 

When she looks at herself, she doesn’t feel fear or revulsion or confusion. Not anymore.

She laughs until Eric comes to see what’s so funny. She can’t explain it to him, so she doesn’t even try.

* * *

_1996_

“How the hell would _you_ know how I feel?!” Cliff demands. His voice echoes, distorted, as it comes out of his mechanical voice box. “Your only family are the freaks upstairs! What the fuck do you know about losing someone you love?!”

Fury makes Niles feel like ice is digging into his brain, making him hiss out words angrier than he meant to. “I know _exactly_ how you feel,” he snarls. “I lost my own daughter. I’ve spent _decades_ trying to get her back. Don’t you _dare_ try to lecture me about losing your family.”

Cliff stops, and the silence hangs in the room so heavily it feels suffocating. Niles is aware he’s breathing hard. He shouldn’t feel this furious. How _dare_ someone like _Clifford Steele_ believe they have any ground to lecture _him_ on _family?_ How _dare_ one of _his own creations,_ someone he took and _lovingly resurrected,_ talk back to him like this? 

He has half a mind to smack him, but he’s well aware it would hurt his own hand far more than it could possibly hurt any part of Cliff’s body. It wouldn’t serve any productive purpose, not really. He had to control himself.

“I didn’t know that,” Cliff says. His voice is hollow. Of course it is. Niles designed it that way. It’s not going to tug on his heartstrings. “I’m… sorry.”

 _You should be,_ Niles wants to say. Instead—“It’s alright. Like you said, you didn’t know.”

Cliff nods, slowly. It creaks a little. He should be able to fix that the next time he has to give him an upgrade. Squeaking hinges are easy enough to manage. “How… how did it happen?”

Now, _this_ is something Niles can work with. “A man who hates me more than anything took her from me,” he explains. The best part about using this story is that it’s the truth. He doesn’t even have to lie to them to get them on his side. “She’s a very special girl. I believe her to be alive. But ever since she was taken, I’ve looked for her—and people like her who I could protect from people like that wretched man.”

“So she’s not dead,” Cliff says after a moment. He wants to jump up and scream that _no, then, it isn’t the same, because Clara is_ dead _and Niles’ daughter is_ alive, _or at least he thinks she is,_ but that wouldn’t be right. It’s not fair. Clara’s dead. She’s dead and it’s all Cliff’s fault.

“No, she isn’t,” Niles acknowledges. “But she’s been kidnapped by a madman and held captive for decades. Whatever he’s done to her… perhaps it would have been better if she had passed away. He taunts me with her, sometimes. That’s how I know she’s alive, and afraid, and in pain.”

Cliff tries to swallow down tears of frustration before he remembers he can’t swallow _or_ cry from _any_ emotion anymore. “So does the pain ever stop?”

Niles reaches to pat his knee, knowing full well it will only serve to remind him more of his dissociation from the rest of society. “I’m afraid that, at least in my case, it never has.”

* * *

“Eric?” Dorothy says, sitting on the sand and watching the ocean swell in and out. She dropped the _mister_ part a little while ago, but she can’t remember exactly when. “What do you know about my father? You’ve met him, haven’t you?” He let it slip once that she didn’t look or sound anything like him, but she’d been too afraid to press him for details at the time. She’s not afraid now.

She recognizes the sound from beside her as one of frustration. “I know a lot of things about him. What do you want to know?”

She traces some designs in the sand with one finger. It’s soothing to feel the grains against the pads of her fingertips. “Anything. Everything. I don’t even know his name.”

“His name is Niles Caulder, and he’s the biggest asshole I’ve ever had the personal displeasure of meeting. And I used to work for a brain in a jar who thought he was better than everyone else because he could recite _The Odyssey_ from memory.” Eric curls his lip. A new crack splits down the side of his face and leaks blue-white light. “He thinks he can control everyone’s lives and he’s got a god complex a mile wide.”

“You said you had a god complex once,” Dorothy remembers. “And then you ran into a wall you made and passed out.”

“Yeah, but it’s _different._ Mostly.” He waves a hand and a bottle of something full of bright blue liquid appears in his hand. He takes a sip of it. It smells like rotten fruit. “I thought you were gonna ask about your mom. Now _that’s_ a real story.”

“I already know about my mother.” Dorothy sniffles a little. Thinking about how her mother used to yell at her makes her feel like she’s a little kid who’s going to start crying. She wishes it didn’t. She’s not a _baby._ “She hated me.”

“That old bitch at the farm wasn’t your mother,” Eric scoffs. “She was just someone your daddy hired to make sure you didn’t run into any busy roads because he couldn’t be bothered with you.” At the stunned expression on Dorothy’s face, he sat up straighter and swallowed down another sip of his drink straight from the bottle. “Shit, kid, you really didn’t know?”

“No,” Dorothy says. Her voice is tiny.

“Oh. Fuck. Well, your real mom lived up on this giant ass mountain, your dad tried to explore it to find some other poor critter he could throw in a cage and study, and he found her instead.” Eric snaps his fingers a few times and the liquid in the bottle cycles through a few different colors. “Asshole actually deluded himself into thinking he cared about her for a little while. And then you came along and he ended up stealing you away and sending you off to that fucking farm.” He eyes Dorothy critically. “You look more like her than like your old man, that’s for sure.”

Hardly even daring to breathe, Dorothy sits up on her knees, hanging onto his every word. “...I do?”

“Yeah, you do. She was the last of her nation, I think.” Eric frowns. The new crack stops branching out. Dorothy’s never seen him this contemplative before. “Probably has descendants in the Tlingit, though. And she wouldn’t have let anything die with her. She deserved a lot better than Niles, I can tell you that much. Saved his life and all she got was her daughter stolen.” There’s disgust in his voice now. “She died sometime after that. Before I was in here. I only know what’s important to the story, and I don’t think Niles thought she was all that important. Only you.”

Dorothy’s mouth feels dry. Her mother… her mother wasn’t… she was… her mother had people. Or at least people she could have found. People who could have been _Dorothy’s,_ with a culture she could have really belonged within. Her mother had a home. Her father had destroyed her home and taken Dorothy away from someone who could have loved her.

And what had he done with her? Nothing. He’d just dumped her with a woman who hated her and made her feel worthless. Because to him, she _was_ worthless, wasn’t she? If he had actually loved her, he would have visited. He would have tried to actually be her father. He would have loved her.

He wouldn’t have treated her like she was nobody. 

“I hate him,” she manages to get out. Her heart pounds, hard and heavy, in her ears. She feels like she might be sick.

Eric’s wide smile returns, more genuine and somehow vicious than she’s ever seen it. “Attagirl.”


	3. aol zllk vm kvbia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a lot nicer to Vic than canon was, because he deserves it, and because I love him.
> 
> [ **CW:** emotional/psychological abuse, manipulation, briefly implied psychiatric abuse, briefly implied suicide (through context of what happened to Marybeth), mentions of death, unreality, light body horror (mentions of Mr. Nobody's weird ass body again), and implied animal death (rat and insect).]

“I have to… scare them?” Dorothy hugs herself and peers down at the shimmering puddle reflecting five faces in its swirling depths. “Won’t he know it’s me?”

“Nah, I’ll be taking care of ole Niles personally.” Eric pats her head. He’s gotten more manic these past few days. Voice louder, movements and expressions more showy. He was the one who suggested Dorothy get herself an outfit to match him—a loose dress with a black top and skirt striped through with white, white globes, and a cherry red heart stitched onto the left side of her chest. “You just take care of his pets.”

Dorothy looks down at the puddle again. She’s grown very familiar with the people she can see. Eric told her all about them, and showed her pieces of their lives. Their histories spread out before her like a hideous painting.

Rita Farr. A disgraced actress, and the first one her father took and tried to turn into his own. She’s a—Eric says they’re called “matter morphs.” People who can shapeshift, but only with their own mass. No animals or fancy materials. Just flesh and bone. Eric says she’s weak. From the “footage” she’s watched, Dorothy isn’t so sure she would agree, but he’s the expert on these people, not her. 

Larry Trainor. A pilot. And the negative spirit inside him, which has a real name, but Eric says it’s a spoiler to say because even Larry himself doesn’t know it. Less weak just because the being inside of him is more aggressive, but on his own, a pushover who’s only strength is the radiation making him a monster.

Jane. And Hammerhead. And Flit. And Baby Doll. And Silvertongue. And The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. And Driver 8. And Lucy Fugue. And the other 56. They’re the most dangerous. Eric says she shouldn’t even try to take them on if they fight against whatever she shows them. She’s not ready for that. And neither is he, but he’ll try anyway if she can’t do it.

Cliff Steele. A race car driver and professional daredevil who got his body destroyed. Eric says the only thing she’ll need to do to defeat him is show him the proof that his daughter is still alive. Dorothy doesn’t feel much sympathy for him. She saw how he treated his family while he was a man. 

And he’s not there, not yet, but she’s supposed to be on the lookout for Vic Stone. A superhero named Cyborg. Eric doesn’t consider him a threat in the slightest, so Dorothy doesn’t either, but she thinks she likes him. He always loved his mom. And his dad isn’t very nice to him a lot of the time. And he’s very nice to people. And Eric showed her a “video” of him rescuing a cat out of a tree. She liked seeing that a lot. You can tell a lot about people by how nice they are to animals.

Still, no matter how nice Vic seems to be, these are the people Niles took as his family instead of her.

What made them so much more deserving than her?

What made them a better family than one that included her?

What made him abandon her and choose them?

“Okay,” Dorothy hears herself say, pushing down all the questions she wants to scream to the unfeeling White Space around her. “They’re trying to run now, aren’t they? In the bus?” She wipes away the image with a wave of her hand. The grin she aims at Eric is real. At least she’s pretty sure it is. “Time to open up your…” She tries to remember his exact wording. “Big fat hole.”

The laughter she gets at that is most  _ definitely  _ real. No  _ ifs _ or  _ ors _ about it. Somehow, that’s comforting.

Even if Niles Caulder didn’t want her, even if the woman who pretended she was her mother didn’t want her, even if  _ nobody  _ out there in the real world wanted her… Eric did. He had to.

That must have meant something. It  _ had  _ to.

* * *

“Where is she, Morden?” Niles has never put more fury into his voice in his life than he does in this moment. He wants to destroy the man in front of him, fragments and all. He had thought he’d been angry on the bus, when he first appeared. But this is nothing compared to that. This is the anger that drives men to beat others to death, to wage wars, to destroy lives. He knows it well, in some form or another, but it’s never been this intense before.

Yet he can’t do anything—trapped here in the White Space, he’s completely immobile, hanging in the air as if from a noose, hauled upright uncomfortably by invisible hands. Like he’s encased in glass. He can’t even spit at him.

“Where’s  _ who?”  _ Morden cocks his head to one side, the deranged lopsided grin spread across his face more terrifying than the most vicious monster Niles has ever gone up against. “Whoever could you be referring to, dear Niles?”

“You know  _ damn well who,”  _ Niles growls. “My daughter. My Dorothy. Where is she?”

“She’s off having some fun.” Morden dances a little closer, rubbing his hands together. His body ripples, changing into the form he’d taken on the bus when he’d stopped Niles from fleeing. All broken parts and shining empty spaces that aren’t filled here, in the emptiest place in the multiverse. “Just like we’re going to have.”

“Everything you’ve done to her, I will find a way to do to you,” Niles hisses. “I promise you that,  _ Mr. Nobody.  _ I will  _ destroy you  _ for taking her from me. You’re going to wish you were dead by the time I’m through with you.”

Morden claps his hands gleefully. “There he is! Niles fuckin’ Caulder, everybody.” An unseen force shakes Niles all over like a ragdoll. Morden leans back into empty space, a plush red chair appearing beneath him as he kicks his legs up with a bowl of popcorn in his lap. “Let’s see if you’re still talking like that by the time I’m done for the day, or if your brain’s already come out of your ears.”

* * *

They come into the donkey. The three of them. Rita, Larry, Victor—Vic, he likes to be called—four if you count the negative spirit, which Dorothy does, because it  _ deserves  _ to be counted. If it can think, it counts. 

She sent Flaming Katy back home after only a little while. She didn’t like seeing her so scared, rocking back and forth in a ball and crying, tears sizzling where they met the embers of her flesh as she sat in the wasteland Dorothy had painstakingly designed for her. She didn’t like the feeling of being someone who would scare someone like that. A bully, just like the ones who used to torment her.

She doesn’t want to bully these people. 

So she makes them happy instead.

Rita stands in front of the camera and outstretches her arms and looks for all the world like a graceful bird about to take flight. An actress in her prime, star of stage and screen (but mostly screen) and full of words that flow out of her in two languages, an artful rendition of a prayer mixed in with a monologue that makes Dorothy  _ wish  _ she could understand Hebrew from her place in the audience.

Larry rises above the earth unburdened by secrets or the spirit he believes to be a monster in his chest. He screams wordlessly as he flies higher than he’s ever been before, with no answering glow from under his protective suit this time around. Dorothy feels his mad joy, a kind of berserk happiness, more than she sees it.

Vic wakes up and steps downstairs, cybernetic enhancements replaced with ordinary—but expensive and well made—prosthetics. He crashes into his mother with a hug that says more than words ever could, remaining eye squeezed tightly shut as he tries not to cry, the memory of losing her fading away like the hazy aftermath of a nightmare. A heat mirage when the rain begins to fall.

“I love you,” he says when he pulls back, hands still gripping her shoulders. His voice is thick with the beginnings of tears. “I love you so much, Mom. But this isn’t real, is it?” He somehow looks right at where Dorothy is standing, even though he can’t possibly see her. Can he? “None of this is real.”

Elinore Stone freezes like a paused home movie, a loving smile still painted on her face. Silas stops too, midway through bragging to someone on the other end of his phone call about how Vic won the goal or touchdown or something (Dorothy doesn’t know  _ anything  _ about sports. She was really hoping he just wouldn’t listen too closely to his false father’s praise).

“No,” Dorothy says quietly. There’s no point in hiding anymore. Vic’s eyes sweep up and down as he gets a good look at her for the first time, illusion around him wearing away as his traditional prosthetics are replaced. He doesn’t look away when he gets to her face. He’s only the second one to do that the first time. Eric was first. Something inside her feels warm. “It’s not. I’m sorry. I tried to make it real.”

“Are you the one who took Niles?” Vic asks. His voice is calm and measured even though Dorothy’s sure he’s probably breaking down inside from seeing his mother again. Maybe she should have picked something else. Something that wouldn’t make him almost cry. That was the kind of thing a  _ bully  _ did. And Dorothy Spinner was  _ not  _ a bully.

Still, Dorothy scowls when he mentions her father’s name. “No,” she repeats, trying not to let her emotions show. She’s much less successful at that than Vic. He’s probably had practice. “But I wish I was. I’m just helping.”

“Why?” His eye narrows, but she doesn’t think he’s going to try to attack her anything. He probably couldn’t overpower her, even if he  _ is  _ a grown-up.

(Dorothy remembers what Eric said. That he hasn’t grown since the accident that killed his mom and tore his body to shreds. He looks like he could be only a little older than her. But she’s older than she looks, isn’t she? She’s spent a long, long time in the White Space.)

Dorothy’s not dumb enough to tell him. She likes him, but she likes Eric more, and even if she didn’t, she can’t trust someone she just met out of nowhere. (...Even though she trusted Eric like that. Out of nowhere.) So she just makes an  _ X  _ gesture over her chest with her arms and then pushes them out, and lets the White Space dissolve around the two of them, shaping into a maze of mirrors with no way out. 

She steps back and watches the three of them, but it’s only a second before Larry starts  _ screaming  _ and Rita’s beautiful voice cracks into sobs and she realizes with a hint of alarm that Eric must be there only a heartbeat before she can  _ feel  _ him manipulating the space to  _ hurt  _ his subjects, and all Dorothy can do is stand there with her heart sinking into the pit of her stomach, and—

The spirit bursts out of Larry’s chest and smashes through the whole house of cards, obliterating the memorials tethering everyone to the White Space and expelling everyone back to where they came from. They burst one by one, the last one dissolving into a puff of crow’s feathers. 

Eric doesn’t scold Dorothy for being too soft on Niles’ little toy soldiers. He doesn’t have to. His lack of acknowledgement toward her efforts to keep them stuck just out of reach from each other and from the real world says more than enough.

* * *

The first time Dorothy sees her father in person, he’s unconscious, held up by the sheer force of Eric’s will. His limbs dangle limply, though his fingers twitch a little like he’s dreaming of punching someone. She creeps in a circle around him. It doesn’t feel like he’s really there. It feels like watching him on TV, like the “footage” Eric always has of him or of the rest of them. 

But he’s there. He’s really there.

Niles Caulder. The man who abandoned her. Who did surgeries on her, according to the woman who pretended to be her mother, but never stayed to watch her grow up. Who took her from the mother she never had a chance to know and sent her to that awful place and ruined her life until Eric found her. Until he saved her.

Niles Caulder. The man who is supposed to be her father but never was. The man who was supposed to be her father, but stole her and then abandoned her instead of taking responsibility. The man who Eric has been watching all these years. Who he says is his greatest enemy, for hurting him and then abandoning him just like he did with Dorothy.

Niles Caulder. The man who twisted the lives of dozens of people just because he could. The man who must think she died. Or maybe he doesn’t. Maybe for all he knows, she’s still living on that farm, no matter how many years its been since she left. 

Dorothy wants to kick him in between his legs, but she doesn’t, even though he couldn’t do a damn thing to stop her if she went for it.

She just turns back to face Eric, grim resolve settling in her veins.

She won’t compromise her morals, not even for him, the only one who ever cared about her, but that doesn’t mean she won’t help him. She’s pretty sure he can feel that hanging in the air around her, the concrete of her imaginary city pushing up from under her feet.

“What do you want me to do?” She asks, and her voice is hard, only shaking the tiniest bit.

Eric pats her on the head like always. “I want you to find me a rat.”

* * *

Dorothy names the orphaned baby rat she finds Admiral Whiskers, and makes him a little friend out of the bug parts that get caught on the windshields of cars that comes out looking like a Frankenstein-esque cockroach. It’s just like bringing any other imaginary friend to life. She names him Ezekiel.

Time works a little differently in the White Space, so she’s not entirely sure what’s going to happen or when, but she likes talking to them, the two of them balanced on her knees. Admiral Whiskers talks about getting revenge on the robot who killed his mother, and Ezekiel talks about the end of days. Which Dorothy doesn’t know anything about so she’s not sure how that personality trait ended up in there. 

Eric torments Niles in another part of the White Space, and she’s pretty sure at one point the world starts to end, but she doesn’t pay attention to it.

(That’s a lie. She pays enough attention to see Niles set up Jane and the rest to be tortured and then watches him pretend to save him. She feels too sick to her stomach to look at it any closer. Just one more reason she hates him.) 

She just sits with her friends and tries not to think about how close Niles is. How she could run over and make him  _ pay  _ for abandoning her if she really wanted to.

She never does, though. Even if she could. She never does.

* * *

“You  _ fought  _ Mr. Nobody?” Rita smooths her hair down, avoiding eye contact with Steve by fidgeting with one of the many trophies adoring the table beside her.

Steve laughs. It’s a harsh sound. “Of course we did. That’s why the Doom Patrol was formed. We were supposed to rescue Niles’ daughter from him.” Opens his arms, gesturing to the trinkets surrounding him. “And we did! We kicked that old coward’s ass all the way back to the fourth dimension.”

“So he  _ is  _ the one who took Niles’ daughter,” Rita says slowly. That had been something of a revelation, finding out that everyone else knew about her. Well, except for Vic. He’d just frowned and looked off into space when it was brought up, making internal calculations that he did not share with the public. None of them knew that Vic had been wondering exactly what Niles’ daughter looked like. “And now he’s taken Niles as well.”

“It couldn’t possibly have been him,” Steve dismisses. “Like I told you, we got rid of him years ago. Got that poor girl back home safely to him and everything. Mr. Nobody hasn’t been seen since the  _ sixties,  _ Rita. If he’s even still alive, he’s probably going to be licking his wounds until he eventually rots in whatever hole he crawled into to hide from me. From  _ us,  _ I mean.”

Something occurs to Rita, prickling at the back of her mind. Slow and sliding. This is wrong. This is all wrong. Steve is  _ wrong.  _ And not just in the factual sense, because of  _ course  _ Mr. Nobody—Eric Morden, that’s his real name, isn’t it?—is back, because he’s the one who took Niles, and they  _ know  _ that. It’s not just speculation. It’s the truth. But Steve is  _ wrong  _ in the physical sense, too. He’s a little  _ too  _ handsome, his suit is a little  _ too  _ crisp, when he smiles his teeth are a little  _ too  _ white…

“That poor girl,” she echoes slowly. “Steve, do you even know her name?”

That too-perfect smile disappears as the walls around them ripple and start to vanish at their edges, and Rita hears Marybeth crying before she sees her. 

* * *

Admiral Whiskers goes out and does his job, creeping into Cliff’s body and wreaking havoc on him and everyone around him from the inside out. When he’s done, he comes right back to her, and she scratches his little ears and tells him he did a great job, and gives him some popcorn and chicken and lets him wander around in the inside-outside world for a little while as rewards.

“He’s just  _ perfect,  _ isn’t he?” Ezekiel sighs when he’s gone, or at least it’s the closest to a sigh he can make. He cleans his antennae like he's trying to make himself look more presentable. “What a wonderful rat.”

Dorothy frowns and pats him with one finger. She didn’t give Ezekiel much of a personality, but she still gave him some, so she’s got no idea where that came from. “I guess he is a pretty handsome rat,” she acknowledges. Ezekiel may not know much, but he probably knows more about the beauty standards of rats than she does. “If you’re into rats.”

They watch together as Larry and Vic approach Danny the Street. Dorothy knows about them, a little bit. Eric says they’re a piece of Neverland that got split off from the main thing and now roams the world, sentient and protecting people. Dorothy isn’t quite sure what Neverland  _ is,  _ but she thinks it’s nice that there’s someone out there like Danny the Street. Someone helping people.

It’s there, watching on one of the little screens Eric says are called “brand-unspecific and therefore non-copyrighted tablets” as Larry and Vic wander into Peeping Tom’s Perpetual Cabaret, that Dorothy sees someone like her for the first time.

They’re not one of the dancers. They’re sitting in the audience next to someone with a shock of bright blue hair, swirling tattoos going down the side of their face and neck and vanishing into their low-cut shirt. They don’t look  _ exactly  _ like her. Their skin is pale, their hair is light brown shot through with glittery stripes of pink, and one of their arms ends in a rounded nub instead of a hand. 

But their face…

It’s still not exactly like hers. Not  _ quite.  _ But their jaw is sunken in. Their eyes push out of their face. Their nose, while not pushed up, is flattened. One of their ears is nearly flat to their head, and the other one has a hearing aid fitted over it. They’re laughing at a joke the person next to them just told. They look happy.

Tears burn at the back of Dorothy’s throat, and she coughs to clear them away, turning the tablet off and setting it down beside her. She can’t bear to look at that any longer, wondering if she could have been that happy and content from the start.

“Come on, Ezekiel,” she says as she stands up, and he flies up to perch on her shoulder. “Let’s go see how Eric’s doing with that Beard Hunter thing.”

* * *

The halls of the Ant Farm are mostly empty, aside from a few agents scurrying around. They don’t pay Dorothy any attention, because they don’t even know she’s there, all content in their knowledge that if something  _ abnormal  _ was lurking in the shadows, their myriad of sensors and detectors would warn them about it. Dorothy’s not going to give them a reason to think they’re wrong.

“Are you the one doing this?” Vic asks. He’s hunched in the corner, hands pressed against his head, but he’s looking up at her like the pain doesn’t mean anything. Dorothy feels bad. She feels really, really bad. This is bullying, even though it comes from someone like Eric.

She shakes her head. “No.” 

“Can you make it stop?” He closes his eyes, finally, and Dorothy barely has to strain her senses to know what he’s seeing. Horror floods through her veins as the sound of crashing and shattering glass and the rush of flames fills her ears. 

_ “Yes,”  _ she says firmly, and knows when Vic’s shoulders immediately slump and his eyes open that she’s been successful. “I’m—I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t—I didn’t do it. I swear.”

She feels like she’s going to be sick. Eric… Eric shouldn’t be doing things like this. He shouldn’t be hurting people like this. Maybe everyone else deserves it, but she’s  _ seen  _ Vic do good things. She’s seen  _ all  _ of them do good things, really, but he does them effortlessly. He does them just because he wants to help people and make the world a better place.

How can something like that be wrong? How can someone like that be worthy of being hurt? Worthy of having to relive the worst day of their life over and over again? 

It’s not  _ right. _

“You’re her, aren’t you?” Vic says after a long stretch of silence. “You’re Niles’ daughter.”

Dorothy thinks about that. About how she’s supposed to be Niles’ daughter, but she never really was. About how that’s the only thing Niles’ pets and Vic know about her. About how she’s pretty sure for a long time, that’s what Eric thought about her whenever he saw her. 

(Maybe it still is.)

She settles on saying “I don’t know” and stepping backward, melting back to the White Space. It’s true. She doesn’t know. She’s supposed to be Niles’ daughter, but she’s not. She’s better as Eric’s apprentice than she ever could have been as NIles’ child—as another one of his toys—she knows that much. 

Eric won’t be happy she helped Vic. But it’s better this way. It has to be, because it means less people have to suffer. Eric never seems to care about that. Suffering is inconsequential. Suffering is a byproduct of controlled and uncontrolled chaos. Suffering doesn’t mean anything to him, unless it’s the suffering of  _ Niles.  _ He seems to like that quite a bit. More than he likes anything else.

Dorothy remembers what he told her about Niles, the first time she asked.

_ He thinks he can control everyone’s lives and he’s got a god complex a mile wide. _

Even though he said it was different, when she plays it back in her head, it sounds like someone else she knows.


	4. dolyl kv fvb ilsvun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last one! I hope everyone enjoyed this.
> 
> [ **CW:** this chapter contains psychological abuse/manipulation, self-hatred/self-blame, mentioned death, mentioned child harm, ableism, and some slight body horror coming from descriptions of a few of Dorothy's imaginary friends.]

Dorothy feels them entering the White Space. All five of them.

She feels it when Eric takes inspiration from her and traps them all in the life they want to have, a world with no accidents or experiments that he promises them he can make real. Dorothy believes him when he says that. She’s watched him change the past before. Time doesn’t exist inside the White Space. It’s just another thing you can play with.

But they refuse. They turn their backs on it, on everything they ever wanted to be.

At first she doesn’t understand. This is what they’ve been after from the start, isn’t it? A chance to start fresh? Don’t they realize that this way they’ll be free from Niles? From the person who destroyed their lives, who destroyed what they could have had, just like he ripped her own life apart?

And then…

And then Dorothy sees it. Sees Larry reach out for someone who isn’t there, and watches Rita reach out right back to him. Sees Cliff as he automatically grabs for Jane and Hammerhead as they wrestle for the front and watches them agree to reciprocate. Sees Vic, eyes closed and prosthetic fingers reaching for anyone to grab onto, and sees Jane and Rita take each of his hands.

_ Oh. _ That’s why they didn’t accept it. Not because they could live lives without being destroyed from the inside out.

Because they couldn’t live lives without each other.

So maybe she whispers to Rita that the only way to control the White Space is by remembering that it’s not real. That  _ you  _ control what happens in it. Anyone can narrate and fix the space around them, but it takes a special kind of person to  _ really  _ mold it, and she knows Rita is that kind of person. She’s an actress, after all.

Dorothy watches them find each other, and then Niles. She watches them run to not-quite embrace him. Pressing close and promising him that the whole sordid affair is over, and he’s going to be just fine. Vic is the only one who doesn’t say anything, looking right at where Dorothy should be standing completely invisible to all of them.

(Heat signature sensors and a night vision mode aren’t Grid’s only features, after all.)

“So,” Eric says, rolling his eyes, “you idiots found your Chief.” He claps slowly. Dorothy covers her mouth to stifle a giggle.  _ This  _ is the Eric she knows and cares for. The showman, not the madman. (Though maybe he’s always been a little of both.) “Great job. Salutes all around.”

“Where is she?” Niles moves forward. The chair Rita made up for him is silent. Dorothy appreciates that kind of thoughtfulness before she can stop herself. Admiral Whiskers rests one paw on her black buckled shoes before he scurries away to find a way back to the inside-outside world. “Where’s my Dorothy, Morden?”

“Dorothy? Oh, she’s right here!” Eric makes a movement similar to jazz hands. Dorothy draws herself up, smoothing down her striped skirt before hopping forward, letting the White Space draw back to reveal her to her father for the first time.

They all stare at her, except for Vic. He keeps his eyes on the real enemy.

Dorothy lifts her chin and faces them. She’s not going to hide back in the White Space. She knows they’re not focused on the dress she’s wearing, the gleam of the heart-shaped buckles on her shoes, the curl of her hair. They’re looking at her face. Taking in the ways it’s wrong. She doesn’t look away from Niles’ face, focusing on the space in between his eyebrows.

Niles is the first to speak, of course. “What has he  _ done  _ to you?”

Dorothy doesn’t notice, but Eric moves closer, like he’s going to put his hand on her shoulder. He barely realizes he’s doing it himself. Certainly, it’s only to make Niles more nervous. No other reason.

Dorothy narrows her eyes and raises her chin higher. She’s not afraid of him. She’s not afraid of any of them. “He  _ saved _ me,” she says, loud and clear. “He’s done more for me than  _ you  _ ever have.”

_ Now  _ Eric squeezes her shoulder. “You hear that, Niles?” He’s beaming. “All that hard work manipulating people and destroying lives was for nothing. Your daughter  _ hates  _ you.” 

Niles reaches in her direction, face stricken. “Dorothy, whatever he’s done to you—whatever he’s told you—”

“He told me a lot. He told me about how you took me away from my mother and left me on that farm because you didn’t give a  _ fuck  _ about what happened to me after you  _ stole me  _ from the only person who could have always loved me,” Dorothy says as venomously as she can manage. Niles flinches with every word. “But he didn’t need to tell me everything. I  _ saw  _ what you did to them.” Dorothy points at the people arranged in a loose semi-circle around him.

Niles’ face goes pale. “What… whatever do you mean?”

“Go on, Niles,” Eric goads. “Tell them. Tell them what you did, and I’ll undo any brainwashing I might have on your daughter.” He cocks his head and tightens his grip on Dorothy’s shoulder. Not enough to be painful, but enough to be comforting. “You can have her back, and all you have to do is tell the truth. Didn’t you tell me that you’d trade their safety for hers?”

Niles looks at the people around him, who are suddenly sharing looks of shock. Or at least the ones with visible facial expressions are. “You know Mr. Nobody lies about everything,” he tries, but Dorothy can see Jane’s fists clench with suspicion and Vic takes a small step back, resting his hand on his other arm, right where his sonic cannon would form. “He’s lying about this, too.”

“Maybe I am,” Eric acknowledges. “But are you going to risk it? Knowing what I could do to your poor, innocent little girl?” He leans over from just behind her so his smile is right next to Dorothy’s ear. “All the ways I could make her suffer for the things you’ve done to me? The things you’ve done to  _ everyone  _ listening right now, except the people watching at home?”

The silence draws out. Dorothy almost isn’t certain if Niles is going to fall for it. Vic clearly isn’t. Dorothy doesn’t even bother reaching out to understand what they’re feeling. She doesn’t have to. The mixture of betrayal and suspicion and confusion is evident within each and every one of them. Even Cliff.

“Fine,” Niles finally says through gritted teeth, moving toward her. “You can do whatever you want to them, Morden. Just leave her alone.”

“Hey now—” Cliff starts, right as Hammerhead opens her mouth, most likely to yell  _ fuck this  _ and probably punch both Niles  _ and  _ Eric, but they both get cut off. 

“Not so fast, Caulder. I said you had to tell them the truth. You never cared about them, sure, but that’s not the whole truth,  _ is it?” _ Eric steps backward, and Dorothy steps back with him. “Tell them everything. Otherwise you’re never going to see her again.”

Niles looks around as the people who thought they were his allies step away from him, suddenly paying no attention in the slightest to Eric and Dorothy. “I… I don’t even know where to begin…”

“Spit it out, Niles. We’re all getting bored here,” Eric says loudly. “People can’t keep reading this confrontation forever.”

“I was responsible for everything,” he says in a rush. Dead silence follows his confession. “There were no accidents. I—I was the one behind all of it. I sabotaged everything so you would all gain your… abilities.” He has the nerve to look down. As if he’s honestly ashamed. He repeats, “I was responsible.”

The scream that tears out of Hammerhead’s mouth barely sounds human, and despite being much quieter the broken sob that comes from Rita isn’t any easier to listen to.

Eric laughs and throws his arms wide, and Dorothy doesn’t need to have her years of experience to know that when everyone but Niles disappears, it’s because they’ve been expelled from the White Space for good.

Niles sits there, staring at Dorothy with a pleading expression on his face, and she feels the lightest she’s ever been when she stands as tall as she can, chest puffed out proudly, and tells him as viciously as she can—

“You’re not my father. I hate you. I wish you were  _ dead.” _

His broken cry of grief follows her when she turns around and marches away.

* * *

It’s a party, after that. Dorothy feeds Ezekiel and Admiral Whiskers their favorite snacks and eats slices of cake that taste like exploding stars and Eric drinks more and more of his foul-smelling brightly-colored liquids which Dorothy isn’t allowed to try because she’s “not old enough” even though one time he said he was really only a few years older than her, she just didn’t show it. Not that Dorothy would want to drink from his bottles, anyway.

“You know,” Eric says while halfway through what has to be his fiftieth bottle, “it just isn’t the same without having Niles here to bother.” 

Dorothy stands, letting Ezekiel and Admiral Whiskers fall from her knees, and goes to the outside-inside world to get some fresh air. 

Everything she said to Niles was true. She hates him. He ruined her life. He ruined the lives of other people, too, and he did it just so he could have someone to control—whether that was  _ them  _ or  _ her.  _ He didn’t deserve her pity.

But… maybe the rest of them did, and Dorothy closes her eyes so she can think easier.

Rita, who spoke so  _ beautifully  _ in that dream Dorothy made for her, so wonderful and confident and unafraid of slipping up in movement and pronunciation and so perfectly suited for the limelight. The way it’d been clear on her face when her heart had broken, right at the exact second Niles confessed. The pain Dorothy could feel in her, even now, even outside of the White Space, as the life she had tried to scrape herself together for broke like so many mirrors around her.

Larry, who had just wanted to fly, who’d seemed so  _ content  _ during his brief time on Danny the Street. He’d been so at ease there, during the midway-period between when he’d protected them from the Bureau of Normalcy but hadn’t yet been left back at home—Dorothy will  _ not  _ call it “Doom Manor,” because she’s told Eric a thousand times it’s a stupid name. She… related to that, in a way. She could have been happy there, too.

Jane, and the other sixty-two, who were all just trying to protect their sixty-fourth, a scared little girl who needed to be kept safe. Who had  _ trusted Niles  _ and looked up to him only to have that torn down around her. Who had gone into her own head and faced her own hell and came out triumphant. Hammerhead screaming when she found out the truth about Niles, the most deeply wounded sound Dorothy had ever heard, the kind of scream you made when you realized the truth and it turned out to be worse than ever imagined.

Cliff, who had been a terrible husband and a terrible father and who  _ tried,  _ so  _ hard,  _ to make up for it by helping people even though he clearly didn’t have any idea how to. The cold shock radiating from him when he realized what Niles was saying was true, when he was hit by the lightning-harsh realization that Niles had, indirectly or not, murdered his wife and destroyed his body and his daughter’s whole world in one fell swoop. No screaming or crying from him. Always trapped in his own mind without the luxury of a body to feel it.

Vic, who had been betrayed by his father and by his remaining father figure in one awful night of confessions, even if he hadn’t been directly torn to shreds by Niles’ own hand. Who had lost his mother to something he thought was his own fault even though it turned out  _ not  _ to be. Who had loved his mom and been taken from her. Like how Dorothy had been taken from hers. Who had been betrayed by his father, like how Dorothy had been betrayed by hers. 

It was easy to hate Niles. It had been easy to not think about how much of what they were doing was wrong when it was just against Niles, because Niles was someone she could easily label as being a  _ bad person.  _ Because he  _ was,  _ she was sure of it.

She just… wasn’t so sure that his crimes meant she should be bullying other people.

Some awful voice inside her climbs up her throat and sings into her ear that  _ wasn’t that what the woman who pretended to be her mother had done? _

Dorothy is only vaguely aware she’s sobbing, but she knows she hasn’t cried like this in years. Not since the first time she had to blow out a candle. All around her, like crocuses pushing through snow drifts, her imaginary friends claw their way to the surface and press in close in a circle of comfort. 

She pulls, and pulls, and pulls, opening up wells deep inside her she didn’t even know existed. Friends she’s never seen emerge, a robot taller than any human man with a suit and tie under his leather jacket and a human face, a woman who’s tall and strong and melted like a candle and whispers words in a singing language, a man all wrapped in tinfoil with a TV antenna sticking out of his head, a person with sixty-four eyes all over their body, a man with eyes that don’t match the metal shine in his skin. 

Dorothy keeps pulling, because she doesn’t know what else to do, until there’s nothing left but to lay on her back and sniffle because it’s already hard to breathe through her nose and it’s impossible when it’s all stuffed up from crying.

She hates Niles. She hates him more than anything, because he’s a bully.

She loves Eric. She thinks she might love him more than anything, even if he  _ is  _ a bully sometimes.

Does that make  _ her  _ a bully, too?

A crow lands on a fence post behind her and caws twice into the night. Dorothy doesn’t look at it. She keeps looking up at the moon and wondering who she’s supposed to be.

She’s not Dorothy Caulder, and she never was. If her birth mother had a family name, she doesn’t know it. She’s not Dorothy Spinner, the name that came from her adopted mother’s family. And she can’t be Dorothy Morden. Or Dorothy Nobody. No matter how much she really does love him.

“Who am I?” She asks the chilly air. Her still-present imaginary friends don’t say anything in response. Not even the crow up way too late to be something natural has an answer for her.

* * *

Danny the Street is silent when her feet first touch their worn main road. Everyone who hasn’t gone to bed for the night is inside enjoying themselves, whether at a bar or inside the Perpetual Cabaret. Danny themselves must notice her, but they don’t say anything to greet her, not even to sound an alarm.

“I know they’re here,” she says quietly, and the wind picks up enough that she can hear a question on the breeze. “Niles’ family. I know they’re all here.”

That’s how she ends up sitting on the edge of the stage inside the Cabaret. Danny somehow convinced everyone to clear out and move across the street to a never ending disco. Niles’ people are the only ones left there, all watching her with varying degrees of suspicion.

Jane speaks first, sounding more like Hammerhead than like herself as she turns to leave. “Fuck this.”

“Wait!” Dorothy throws out her hand. If this was the White Space, the door would slam and then close in on itself until it was gone. This isn’t the White Space, so the door doesn’t move, but Jane does stop. “Please. I want to talk. I just don’t know what to say.”

“...Do you really hate Niles?” Rita asks, pressing a hand to her heart. 

Dorothy thinks of the imaginary version of her, twisted and melted but  _ smiling  _ and beautiful all the same, and nods as she quietly says, “You should too.”

There’s more silence after that. A ring of people staring at her. Danny would be watching her too, if they had any eyes. Dorothy knows that. She hunches in. It’s different in the White Space, where she can be herself freely. Even on Danny the Street, probably the safest place in the world for people like… like her, could judge her and try to destroy her with it.

“Trust me,” Hammerhead says in answer. “I do. We all do.” She glares around at everyone, fists clenched as usual. “Or at least we’d  _ better.” _

“Of course we do,” Cliff says like he’s trying to reassure her, and makes an aborted gesture with his hand like he’s going to squeeze her arm but decides better of it at the last minute. “If he were here, I’d beat his face into the ground.”

Dorothy flinches at that. Not because it’s a threat toward Niles. She couldn’t care less about that. But because she is, inadvertently, the reason all of them have suffered, even if they haven’t quite realized it yet—when they do, she’s sure she’s going to have to flee back to the White Space and hide out with Eric for as long as it takes for them to forget all about her. So probably forever.

“If you hate Niles, how can you stand Mr. Nobody?” She looks over at Vic, and he repeats his question. He’s trying to give away nothing about how he’s feeling, but Dorothy’s not afraid of that. She knows he’s feeling raw and betrayed and angry, she felt it in the White Space. She understands. “How can you stand Mr. Nobody? Don’t you feel like he’s just as bad as Niles?”

She shakes her head so fast it makes her dizzy. “No! He’s—he’s  _ not!  _ He may be a bully, sometimes, but he cares about me. He loves me.”

“...Are you sure he wasn’t just using you?” Larry’s voice is almost completely muffled by the bandages. It’s a wonder Dorothy can hear it at all.

A surge of protectiveness rises inside of Dorothy as she jumps down from the stage to stand in front of it. “He’d  _ never.”  _ She’s not sure if she believes that, really. She’s pretty sure he  _ would.  _ He’s used other people, including the ones in front of her. But she can’t believe he would ever manipulate her like that. “He’d never. He’s not like that. He’s not like  _ Niles.” _

Vic makes a sound at the back of his throat like he’s just fit together the pieces of a particularly difficult puzzle. “He was for us.”

No noise comes out of Dorothy’s mouth when she opens it.

“It wasn’t quite the same,” Vic continues when she can’t formulate a response. “He wasn’t close to us like Niles was. But he used us against each other. Used  _ ourselves  _ against us. He used us to play his sick cosmic game for no reason. He may have been good to you. But he wasn’t to us.”

“But I’m just like him,” Dorothy finally manages to find the words to protest. She didn’t read many books when she was with Eric—when, when, she thought the word  _ when,  _ as in  _ past tense,  _ but she can’t just  _ leave him  _ when he’s the closest thing she has to a real tried-and-true family—but she remembers some phrases cut from paper blizzards. Nature versus nurture. Nature, Niles, his blood in her veins. Nurture, Eric, his power in her mind. Her next words come out shattered. “I don’t want to be a bad person.” 

Not everything Eric did was bad. She has to hold onto that, desperately. He cared about her. He loved her, or something close enough to count. He never hurt her like Niles did. But he hurt these people. These people who Niles wanted to be her family and her prison guards all in one. Who never did anything to  _ him  _ personally except exist as Niles’ toys.

Dorothy thinks she might start screaming.

Instead, she breaks down in tears. Again.

They stand around awkwardly, watching her cry into her hands because she has nothing else left to do.

Cliff and Larry have the most experience with children, having been fathers themselves, albeit not exactly award-winning ones, and after a few tense seconds they move in unison to rub her back before stopping and looking away from each other when they see the other is mirroring them, hands dropping back down to their sides. Hammerhead could never hurt a child, no one in the Underground could, but the turbulent combination of Niles and Mr. Nobody makes her stay back. Rita wants to drape a blanket around her shoulders and promise everything’s ok, but fear of being seen as clumsy and useless holds her down.

And Vic comes forward, a solid thirty seconds into her sobbing, and pulls her into a hug.

He feels warm, and she melts into him, fingers digging into the soft material of his hoodie as she buries her face in his shoulder. She hasn’t been hugged by anyone like this in years. Not since her only friend (and he looks—looked—like Vic, she now realizes. Something about the eyes is the same) she didn’t have to make up left with his family because it got to be too much to stay in their tiny choking town.  _ She’s  _ embraced Eric a few times, latching onto his waist in a sudden burst of joy, but he’s never hugged back for more than a few seconds at the most.

Vic has obviously never been a parent, and he didn’t grow up with siblings. The closest thing to that he had were his teammates when he was still playing football, his peers when he was still running track, and now… whatever it was Rita, Larry, Cliff, and Jane and the others were to him.

But you don’t have to be someone with that kind of experience to have compassion for a child. He felt it with Baby Doll when she got upset seeing Cliff for the first time, the need to comfort someone not just because that was what a hero was supposed to do but because that was what was  _ right. _

And on top of that, there’s… some sense of closure. She helped him, first when he was inside the donkey and whatever dimension it had led to. It had hurt when he’d seen his mom again, but she hadn’t meant it to be teasing. She’d just wanted to make him happy. Mr. Nobody had been the one to turn it into a nightmare. Then she’d helped him in the Ant Farm, in some small act of defiance that he hadn’t fully appreciated was against the man who  _ raised her  _ when it had happened. 

He doesn’t exactly owe her for that. But he never got to truly thank her. And even if she hadn’t done that… she’s a kid, isn’t she? Just a kid.

So he hugs Dorothy as tightly as is comfortable for her, until she pulls back, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. “I don’t know what to do,” she says quietly. “Mr. Eric’s the only one I have.” She swallows thickly at the accidental use of the honorific before whispering her most hidden secretive thought for the first time. The one she’s been holding inside her since he took her from the farm. “He’s my  _ dad.” _

When no one says something in response, Dorothy starts to fidget with her clothes nervously. She’s not wearing the dress she had in the White Space. Just her favorite blue one, the one she took with her all those years ago as a wrapping for everything else she owned. It makes her look perfectly ordinary. Not at all like someone with the kind of power Niles described, when he eventually told most of them exactly what he would expect from them if they ever faced down the man who took his daughter.

Somehow, that makes something in Hammerhead twist, and she silently steps forward to set her hand on Dorothy’s shoulder. The same one Eric squeezed. The way Dorothy looks up at her, eyes full of  _ something  _ deep and dark and hopeful, is enough to make her look away. But not enough to let go.

“Well,” Rita says softly, “we don’t know what we’re doing either.” She looks at Larry for support, and he shrugs in agreement. “So that’s one thing that we have in common.”

“Maybe you could come with us,” Vic says quietly. He holds out his hand. “We’re going to try to find Niles and make him actually answer for what he did to everyone. I think you deserve to have a say in that. And then we’re going to try to find Mr. Nobody. I think you deserve to have a say in that, too.”

Dorothy looks around at all of them for a moment. Her throat feels tight again. She remembers Eric offering her a home with him. A place where she’d never be alone again. She closes her eyes and shakes off the memory, and something melts back in a glimmer of static and crow feathers and dried wax and cockroach wings.

Finally, she takes his hand. Hammerhead keeps her hand on her shoulder, fingers too solid and real and grounding to be like Eric’s, and Rita takes Hammerhead's other hand. Larry takes hers, then Cliff’s, and finally Cliff touches her other shoulder, with Vic at the center of them all. Danny thrums beneath their feet, the heartbeat of life that keeps them moving, joining them all together. A little ring she’s now a part of.

Dorothy lifts her chin and feels like she might be exactly where she’s supposed to be. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm @augustheart on tumblr, and I really, really hope Dorothy is written well in Doom Patrol season two.


End file.
